Winton Blount, 81, a Founder Of the New Postal Service

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Winton M. Blount, the last postmaster general to serve in a president's cabinet and the first chairman of the Postal Service, which he helped create, died on Thursday at his second home in Highlands, N.C. He was 81.

The cause was a long illness, said Joe McInnes, the executive director of the Blount Foundation, Mr. Blount's philanthropy.

As President Richard M. Nixon's postmaster general, Mr. Blount (pronounced blunt) was the architect of a sweeping reorganization of the Post Office Department, calling for removal of the postmaster general from the cabinet and the creation of a self-supporting postal corporation owned by the federal government.

He was also an active philanthropist and art collector who played an important role in Alabama Republican politics for about 50 years.

A successful construction executive, Mr. Blount was serving as president of the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1969, when Mr. Nixon asked him to join the cabinet. He was given the task of modernizing the postal service and making it more efficient.

In May 1969, Mr. Blount offered four basic reforms: adequate financial authority; removal of the system from politics, assuring continuity of management; collective bargaining between postal management and employees; and the power to set postal rates after hearings before an impartial panel.

The ideas became the main elements of the nation's most comprehensive postal legislation, which Mr. Nixon signed into law on Aug. 12, 1970. The new Postal Service, an independent institution in the executive branch, began operating on July 1, 1971, with Mr. Blount as chairman of its board.

Mr. Blount called the reorganization a triumph of persistence and determination. In his 1996 autobiography, ''Doing It My Way,'' he wrote: ''Congress isn't used to dealing with someone who never gives up. When they knock someone down, he usually goes away. I didn't.''

But a few months after the reorganization, he resigned and returned to Alabama to run for the Senate, a campaign in which George W. Bush worked as an aide. Mr. Blount was defeated by the incumbent, John J. Sparkman, a veteran Democrat.

Mr. Blount's family said he became active in Republican politics in 1952, when he supported Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's bid for president. He worked on Mr. Nixon's campaign for president in 1960.

Mr. Blount once said he had politics ''in my blood.'' A wall in his home was lined with photographs of him with several presidents, including Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Gerald R. Ford and the first President Bush.

In June 1963, when Gov. George Wallace tried to block the enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, by standing in a doorway of the University of Alabama, Mr. Blount, a longtime trustee at the university, said he called Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, at his home to try to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis.

Mr. Blount, in his autobiography, said Mr. Kennedy proposed letting the governor read his speech, in which he contended the federal government had overstepped its powers, if Mr. Wallace would then step aside. Mr. Wallace's staged anti-integration protest played out before millions of Americans on televisions across the country.

Born in Union Springs, Ala., on Feb. 1, 1921, Winton Malcolm Blount Jr. attended the Staunton Military Academy in Staunton, Va., and the University of Alabama.

He served from 1942 to 1945 in the Army Air Forces as a B-29 pilot, ending his service as a first lieutenant.

After World War II, Mr. Blount and his brother, Houston, formed Blount Brothers Construction with four war-surplus tractors they bought for $28,000. The company, which grew throughout the 1970's and 1980's, eventually becoming Blount International Inc., built a launching complex at Cape Canaveral, the Superdome in New Orleans and the $2-billion King Saud University in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Blount is survived by his wife, Carolyn; a daughter, Kay B. Miles of Birmingham, Ala.; four sons, Winton III, of Montgomery, Ala., Thomas, of Los Angeles, Samuel, of Birmingham, and Joseph, of Southampton, N.Y.; and two stepchildren, Dr. Robert E. Varner Jr. of Birmingham and Carolyn Stuart Varner King of Lillian, Ala. He is also survived by his brother, 14 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren.

Mr. Blount's first marriage, to Mary K. Archibald, ended in divorce in 1981.

In 1988, Mr. Blount donated 42 paintings, valued at about $15 million, to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. Through his foundation, he also spent $22 million to build a theater for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival on 250 acres next to his home in Montgomery, and $20 million on the Blount Cultural Park there.

Mr. Blount also contributed $10 million to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum here, $5 million to Rhodes College in Memphis, $5 million to Huntingdon College in Montgomery and more than $8 million to the University of Alabama.